I don't think it will come as any surprise when I reveal that I'm quite a peevish person. In fact, I have an upstairs closet and a basement full of peeves. There's probably some tucked in the bottom of my briefcase, as well -- the thing is long over due for a turning out.

Today's peeve is when people say "Eastern Standard Time" thinking it clarifies matters when I know damn well they mean "Eastern Daylight Time". Example: M who is located on the east coast, sets up a meeting for 1:30 PM in Outlook. This shows up on my calendar at 12:30 PM. That's all fine. But M notes in the meeting description "1:30PM Eastern Standard Time." That's what pisses me off because I know if I showed up at the meeting at 1:30 EST, I'd be the only one there.

Here's a little table to illustrate. For those of you who aren't time geeks (not that I am; I'm just nitpicky), UTC is pretty much what we used to call Greenwich time.

Eastern Standard Time (EST)

UTC-5

Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

UTC-4

Central Standard Time (CST)

UTC-6

Central Daylight Time (CDT)

UTC-5

So EST and CDT are both UTC-5 (5 hours earlier than GMT). That means, the 1:30 EST meeting is also at 1:30 CDT but if I go then I will have missed the meeting (probably a small loss).

I know this is a trivial thing to be irked by but aren't all peeves? I will say M and the others who are guilty of this are software engineers at my company and a significant part of our suite deals with employee time. THEY SHOULD KNOW THIS! Plus M could just write "ET" or "Eastern" and avoid the whole issue, not to mention letting Outlook do its job.

another item that usually gets me, is when traveling and entering a different time zone, everyone else keeps asking me what time it is, then they say "Is that our time or their time?"it is at this point, if these are adults, that i take out the oversize wooden mallet and squash them .